The BBC’s latest recreation of the story of Jesus’ Passion hits our screens tonight and I for one would encourage you to watch it. The Passion is the retelling of the last week of Jesus's life from three different viewpoints: the religious authorities, the Romans and Jesus himself.
It has already come in for criticism from Revd. Giles Fraser, who is Team Rector of Putney and a regular columnist for both The Guardian and the Church Times. Fraser’s criticism is that the Jesus portrayed in The Passion is nice but dull. The BBC, he claims, has created an “inoffensive Liberal Democrat Jesus: Nick Clegg with a beard.”
“As with the Lib Dems,” he says, “it's a bit tricky to know why anybody would follow this BBC Jesus. He's nice enough, of course. Pretty. Inclusive. Spiritual. Kind. Yet from a believer's perspective this interpretation damns the saviour of the world with faint praise. Following his BBC makeover Jesus is transformed into a sympathetic male nurse preaching the gospel of equal opportunities … Any moment you expect him to announce that he wants to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. As a consequence, the political, polemical Jesus is spiritualised into oblivion.”
You can make up your own minds tonight, but Fraser’s comments are particularly appropriate to the story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. Why? Because the people who welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem were worshipping the Jesus that they wanted to see rather than the Jesus that was actually coming to them.
They worshipped him as the Messiah coming on a warhorse to lead an uprising that would rid them of their hated Roman oppressors. Instead, Jesus came in humility riding on a donkey to die in order to gain forgiveness both for them and their hated Roman oppressors.
A few days later he turned the expectations of his disciples upside down when he chose to wash their feet. The disciples thought of Jesus as their rabbi at whose feet they sat to learn but, by becoming their servant in washing their feet, Jesus showed them that the true teacher is the one who serves others.
When the people came to understood the sort of person and Messiah that Jesus actually was, their cries of worship turned to cries of crucify. Do we do the same by worshipping a Jesus that we feel comfortable with rather than engaging with the Jesus who always turns our expectations of himself upside down?
The real Jesus challenges us as he forgives us, subverts our expectations as he serves us, turns our world upside down as he saves us. This Holy Week are we prepared to welcome and worship Jesus as he really is, not as we would like him to be?
As Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote:
"Be adored among men,
God, three-numberèd form;
Wring thy rebel, dogged in den,
Man’s malice, with wrecking and storm.
Beyond saying sweet, past telling of tongue,
Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm;
Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung:
Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.
With an anvil-ding
And with fire in him forge thy will
Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring
Through him, melt him but master him still:
Whether at once, as once at a crash Paul,
Or as Austin, a lingering-out sweet skill,
Make mercy in all of us, out of us all
Mastery, but be adored, but be adored King."
(The Wreck of the Deutschland)
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The Innocence Mission - Brotherhood of Man.
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